While the invention has broader utility, one of its objects is to provide a better hamper for use in hospitals and nursing homes than any hamper previously devised. Hampers for that application must be portable, easy to keep clean, easy to store, inexpensive to produce and to use, and they must be capable of being applied to different procedures each appropriate to the storing, movement and disposition of a different class of material. Some of those requirements have been met, in varying degree, by the development of portable folding hamper frames to which a removable bag is attached. The original cloth bags have been replaced by disposable plastic bags.
Those features, however, solve only part of the problems for which hampers can provide solutions, and they perform only part of the functions which hampers can provide. Soiled linen, trash, infectious linen, infectious surgical supplies, bio-hazardous waste, diapers, and other materials must be collected, transported and processed differently. Collection procedures and processing vary greatly. In some cases, it is desired to have the hamper covered; in other cases, not. The hampers in which infectious and hazardous materials are collected should, and ordinarily must, be covered at all times. The trash collection hamper, on the other hand, may need to be covered in some circumstances and uncovered in others. The hamper in which fresh linen is distributed is ordinarily uncovered. The universal hamper would have a cover that provides an easy choice between cover or no cover, and cover closed or open.
Each task tends to present different requirements to the hamper designer. In collection applications, the bag is empty when affixed to the hamper so that it makes little difference whether the bag is assembled from above or below the frame. On the other hand, in distribution applications, the hamper should be designed so that the bag can be attached to the hamper from below with little or no lifting. So, too, in the case of a collection task in which the load will be more than some minimum weight. If a hamper frame is to be universal, so that the number of frames may be minimized, it should be arranged such that the bag may be assembled with the frame from above or from below, and removal from below should be an easy and convenient task.
The list for requirements goes one. Most are not difficult to meet, except that many tend to be contradictory, particularly the requirement for minimum cost. Initial cost is significant, but the cost of utilization is much more important. Hampers are used, and filled and moved, not only by the maintenance staffs and the housekeeping staffs of hospitals. They are used extensively by nurses and physicians in the new-born nursery, the delivery room, the operating room, and in the geriatric's and children's wards. In those areas, to have a hamper that does not need to be attended to, but which, instead, serves as an easily used, convenient tool, is particularly important.
The hamper is an appliance that is moved up and down its hallways and through the hospital all day long. It is not very romantic, and has suffered in the past from minimum engineering and innovative effort. The invention has corrected that situation in recognition of the axiom that a hospital cannot run more smoothly than its hampers.